Obsession Falls Read Free

he had a pistol. That was good for her. Pistols were meant for close work. Hard to aim. Best he could do was thirty to forty feet if he was skilled, and he’d have to stop to really get a bead on her.
    The forest. She had to get to the forest.
    Run as hard as you can.
    She reached the shelter of the trees.
    She’d made it!
    She glanced back.
    He stopped, braced his feet, raised his pistol.
    She ducked behind a tree.
    A shot shattered the bark beside her.
    This was okay. This was good. Because if he was shooting at her, he wasn’t killing the kid.
    Yeah. Real good.
    She ran again, glanced back.
    He sprinted toward her.
    No. She knew this place.
    He didn’t.
    She took a left.
    Another shot.
    She should be counting. He had only six shots … unless that was an automatic pistol, in which case—
    This was no time for math.
    Run, goddamn it.
    There. The foot of the mountain. She took another left, fast and hard, around the rock, and she headed up the steepest incline she’d ever seen. And she’d seen a few.
    Another shot. Close.
    God. Please, God.
    She leaped like a mountain goat over rocks. She ducked under brush.
    She couldn’t zig. She couldn’t zag. The path was narrow. It was curvy. It was damn near vertical. There was only one way up this mountain, and she was on it.
    So was he.
    She could hear him behind her, tearing up the ground as he gained on her.
    She had only one way out. One way to save herself.
    The cave. In the rock.
    Never, ever go in that cave. No one knows where it goes. You could fall. You could break your legs. You could never be found. Never go in. Never.
    Her father’s voice. He meant it.
    But it was his fault she was doing this. His fault he’d taught her to be responsible and do the right thing.
    She dove into the crack in the rock. She wiggled on her belly in the dirt. Fast. Without a whimper. Without a fear of what awaited her.
    She was too afraid of what was after her.
    The kid had run, too. He’d escaped, too. Because otherwise, this was all for nothing.
    Run, kid!
    The farther she went into the cave, the tighter it got. Finally there was nowhere else to go except through a passage so low and narrow it was nothing more than a splinter in the rock. But she went.
    Belly to the ground, head down, she crawled into darkness. She got stuck. Her butt didn’t fit. She gasped. She wiggled. She pulled. She tore skin off her chin. And she was in. Inside. In a cave, unexplored, where she could tumble and break her legs and die a slow death. She shimmied in, staying low—and fell into nothingness.

 
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
    Not nothingness. Taylor fell five feet onto … something. Something hard. Stone.
    Pain exploded in her right wrist. Blood trickled down her cheek. She covered her mouth and bit down on her scream of pain.
    Don’t scream. Don’t scream. He’ll hear you.
    But her wrist really hurt. Her cheekbone up by her eye socket—that hurt, too. She’d struck it on the way down. Every nerve throbbed. Every sense flared.
    The little boy … had she saved him? Had he seized his chance? Had he run away? Or was he even now lying in a puddle of his own blood, or propped against a rock for McManus to find?
    Tears filled her eyes.
    Dead. He was probably dead.
    Because all she had been able to think to do was toss her drawings to the wind in the hopes of distracting his killers.
    She cried. A little. Silently, curled into a fetal position, holding her hurt wrist with one hand, and with her fist over her mouth.
    She heard nothing from above in the shadows.
    Of course not. That monster would not fit. She hoped.
    Okay. Okay, she was safe. For the moment, she was safe.
    She worked on her breathing, trying to stop the gasping, the sobbing. She worked on her heartbeat, trying to calm the thump against her rib cage.
    She had never in her life felt like this, or been in the grip of such terror. She lived near Washington, D.C., one of the most violent cities in the United States, and she had to come back